or almost a century, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's works remained relatively obscure. She
was not recognized as a canonical author until the rise of feminism and
the consequent revision of the canon to include popular literature and
many more professional female writers. For example, in one of the
standard short reference works on the Victorian novel, Boris Ford's
From Dickens to Hardy (1964) Braddon is not even
mentioned; in George Ford's Victorian Fiction: A
Second Guide to Research (1978), Curtis Dahl dismisses her as a
"minor novelist" (29); however, in Andrew Sanders' The Short Oxford History of English Literature
(1994, rev., 2004), Braddon receives an enthusiastic paragraph which
alludes to her "inventive energy and narrative verve" (p. 446). Further,
in Victorian Fiction (2002), in discussing
domestic and gender politics Gail Marshall devotes several pages in the
chapter "1856-1870: Questions of Identity" to Lady
Audley's Secret and Collins's No Name.

Clearly her rehabilitation as a talented novelist with a social and
feminist agenda is well under way. So complete is the current
recognition of Braddon's contribution to English literature that a
selection of her poetry appears in The Broadview
Anthology of Victorian Poetry and Poetic Theory (1999), ed.
Thomas J. Collins and Vivienne J. Rundle, including her somewhat
Tennysonian "Queen Guinevere" (923-924), which she published in 1861.
From Milly Darrell in 1873 to My Sister's Confession, And Other Stories in 1879,
her short stories such as "Eveline's Visitant" (1`862) and "John
Granger" (1870) appeared in a number of anthologies and periodicals, and
have appeared in eleven different anthologies since 1931.